Hello Joerg,
Currently the report designer can't get the schema of the data source because of WCF RIA services' peculiarities. Thus be aware that the available wizards and
Data Explorer would not be populated with data source fields and both Previews would not work. For more information check out the
Using Telerik Reporting with WCF RIA Services help article.
Let me start by stressing that Telerik Reporting is a reporting engine and not a printing library, so rendering HTML produced by RadEditor, RadRichTextBox or any other 3rd party or home grown control is not among our goals.
I would state the obvious: Telerik Reporting is not able and does not have to render all HTML tags and CSS attributes. Support for all HTML tags and css attributes would mean that we will need to develop an HTML engine which will be responsible for rendering this HTML before it hits the client. In other words, we will need to develop a fully functional browser. You see that this task goes completely out of the scope of a reporting product, moreover it is not trivial at all and quite frankly we (the reporting team) do not have the resources and intention to go this way. In fact even Microsoft does not do this in their SQL Reporting Services product.
The existence of the HtmlTextBox is solely based on the need to render a small subset of HTML tags and CSS attributes to support the most common text formatting options:
- Supported HTML tags:
* Font, size (relative size against the font size of the item, default is 3 (1-7)), color (<FONT>)
* Bold, Italic, Underline (<STRONG>,<B>, <EM>, <I>, <U>)
* HyperLink (<A href target>)
* Lists (<OL>, <UL>, <LI>)
* Organize the text in paragraphs (<DIV>, <SPAN>,<P>, <BR>, <CENTER>)
- Supported css attributes:
* background-color
* border-color, border-width, border-style
* text-align (center, left and right only), text-indent
* font-family, font-size, font-weight
* padding, padding-bottom, padding-top, padding-right, padding-left
* color
Telerik Reporting is supposed to render exclusively data and charts, rather than text. So the rich-text formatting options are available for the sole purpose of styling labels and headers.
Still we have prepared a sample project that is utilizing the
WebBrowser control to render HTML to a bitmap. We use an
user defined function that does the trick, and a picture box item which displays the generated image (PNG). We're aware that this approach has several shortcomings and is far from perfect, but it seems to work in most cases and in all
export formats (which support PictureBox items). One thing to note is that you should set the HTML as value for the browser.DocumentText property, in the example we've used URL from the RadEditor examples to quickly illustrate the approach.
Regards,
Peter
the Telerik team
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